Today, Stephen Kotkin shows how “junk history” untethered from actual historical facts can mislead policymakers and the public; Andrew Roberts speaks with Natalie Livingstone about her new book on women central to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals following the Second World War; and Jonathan Rodden explains how the United States became divided between “blue” urban cores and “red” rural areas—and how decentralization, as well as other institutional reforms, could help bridge these geographic political divides.
History
Ignorance of history is a real problem, Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin argues in this essay for Freedom Frequency—but “a problem worse than ignorance exists: junk history.” By “junk history,” Kotkin means those claims or anecdotes “that everyone ‘knows’ and cites or recites but [that have] little or no basis in empirical reality.” In his view, junk history is too often invoked in consequential policy debates. Moreover, it makes for a faulty cognitive framework for understanding the world and making judgments of any sort. To illustrate, Kotkin reflects on an “infamous example,” the Munich Pact between Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy in September 1938, often invoked today “to decry compromise” or anything with the appearance of “appeasement.” As Kotkin details, the Munich Pact “was not so clear cut, as too often portrayed.” A central problem British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain sought to avoid via a deal with Hitler—Communist troops occupying “the heart of Europe” following an alliance with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis—became a messy reality Winston Churchill had to negotiate. Kotkin concludes that the Munich Pact “lives on mostly as junk history, a simplistic morality tale summoned to level accusations of insufficient resolve or outright capitulation,” reinforcing the importance of employing historical analogies with caution. Read more here.
Historian Natalie Livingstone joins Distinguished Visiting Fellow Andrew Roberts on Secrets of Statecraft to uncover the overlooked stories of the women at the Nuremberg trials. From a brilliant American lawyer denied the chance to present her own case to a French Resistance survivor whose testimony confronted Nazi atrocities, Livingstone relates the stories of women who helped shape the pursuit of justice. Drawing on her new book The Nuremberg Women: The Untold Story of the Eight Women Who Brought the Nazis to Justice and her own family’s Holocaust history, Livingstone details courage, complicity, and unexpected moments of hope brought to light by the records of these postwar trials. Roberts and Livingstone also explore why the Allied commitment to evidence and truth at Nuremberg, which guided the design and conduct of the proceedings, still matters today. Watch or listen here.
Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion
In this short video from the Policy Stories series, Senior Fellow Jonathan Rodden explains that America’s political divide is increasingly geographic, with Democrats concentrated in major metropolitan areas and Republicans drawing support from smaller cities and rural communities. Rodden says this divide, rooted in the New Deal era, has deepened as the parties have taken opposing positions on immigration, globalization, and national identity. His research, documented in his 2019 book Why Cities Lose, argues that America’s two-party, winner-take-all electoral system reinforces these divisions, fueling political mistrust and policy uncertainty. Rodden also discusses how institutional reforms, decentralization, and new political coalitions could help reduce polarization and bridge the urban-rural divide. Watch here.
International Affairs
At The Wall Street Journal, National Security Visiting Fellow Jakub Grygiel explains the current constitutional crisis in Poland concerning appointments to that nation’s constitutional court. Claiming to be restoring the rule of law, “Prime Minister Donald Tusk sent riot police to occupy the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, suspended its top two judges, and installed his own choice as the court’s president,” Grygiel writes. After he explains other important details of the episode, including the European Union (EU) siding with Tusk, Grygiel takes a broader view. He argues that events in Poland echo the “11th-century Investiture Controversy,” with officials today disagreeing “not over who has the authority to appoint bishops (the emperor or the pope) but over who has the authority to judge laws and constitutions in [EU] member states.” Grygiel warns that “top-down” pushes from “EU elites” to apply European policies, even when they run counter to national law, threaten the long-term viability of the European project at a time when external security challenges should be inspiring greater unity. Read more here. [Subscription required.]
Economics Research
A new paper from Senior Fellow Jeffrey Clemens and coauthors uses the case of California’s $20 fast-food minimum-wage law to explore powerful but potentially misleading methods in economics research. These approaches, grouped under the label of “synthetic control methods,” promise to allow researchers to identify “a credible counterfactual by closely reproducing pretreatment outcome paths”—in other words, to try to assess what would have happened had a policy (in this case, a minimum-wage increase) not taken effect. In the paper, the authors construct more than 1,400 plausible scenarios to estimate how the new wage law affected employment. The authors find that in 96% of their scenarios, the employment effect was negative. But as they show, the range of outcomes across their scenarios is vast, “illustrating that synthetic control methods are sensitive to specification choice.” The paper offers a reminder that when researchers use advanced techniques like synthetic controls, their assumptions and inputs in creating their models can have a significant effect on findings. Read more here.
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